The Curse of Once Upon a Time

Chapter IX: The Book of Tellers

Serenity camped the rest of the night out in her room. Saige had left, giving her a peaceful sanctuary to think. She couldn't leave her room while everybody was awake without getting yelled at. She knew that it would happen eventually, but she might need to be in a rush to school. There would be no time for an hour-long lecture.

As long as she could push it off, she could brainstorm to come up with excuses. Most of the time, she was good at coming up with excuses, but she was blank. Ever since she had talked to Saige, it had been throwing her off.

She had been able to convince herself that Saige was a figment of her imagination. Saige was not real. Yet what she had said felt real. The Teller part was confusing. An immortal being that they had never heard of before seemed unlikely.

By some phenomenon, people had come up with Gods, angels, demons, ghosts, and other things they had never seen, but Tellers had never been on the list. Serenity didn't think that they made sense. At least Gods made a little sense. Tellers didn't.

The things that Saige had said about her and Lani was what was getting to her head. She didn't think that she and Lani had much in common other than spending so much time in a hospital. Lani had been dead, technically. She hadn't crossed over, but she wasn't living either.

Serenity had never gotten that bad. She'd had to go unconscious for surgery, but she had never been that dead before. There had been something strange about Lani since the start, but Serenity hadn't seen what it was. She thought it was that she had been brain dead, but maybe it was something different.

If she could see the symbols too, did that make them similar? Was there a different reason that caused the both of them to see it? Lani had seen them too. She wasn't messing around, she wasn't playing a joke. Serenity was positive that Lani had seen the same symbols that she had.

She wanted to know more about what they meant, but if there were only so many people that could see them, she wasn't sure if she could find anything on the internet. She wasn't going to be able to get to the library either, she couldn't leave her room and it would be closed by the time the rest of her family was asleep.

She thought about trying to sneak out of her room so that she could get on the computer, but she thought that she might run into the same problem she'd had at the library. She didn't know the first thing to look up about the symbols. She didn't know if it was words, if it was an alphabet, if it was nothing at all. She didn't know the first thing about them.

There was one thing that Serenity knew she could look up and that was teller. Saige had said they were a teller, so if she was going to get anything, it might come from that. But to get to the computer, she had to wait for everybody to go to sleep. It wasn't late enough for them to go to sleep, so she spent the time before looking through the book.

She thought that it might be worth a shot, even if she couldn't read the symbols. She might end up finding something that explain what they were. She hadn't seen all the pages in the book. It was thin, but it was tall. It looked like a textbook, but just a little skinner. She was sure that there would be plenty of information in it. Some part of that would surely help her understand it.

Since she was little, she had been a fan of stories. She liked reading, but she never had the time or attention span to really sit down at start reading. She could read for five minutes, but then she would get bored and want to move on. Art was different for her. At the end, she would have a finished product instead of a finished book. It was something real rather than just a feeling.

So as she was reading, she came up with an idea. Since she couldn't read any of the symbols, she resorted to an alternative of drawing them. Serenity didn't know how many symbols she was going to end up drawing, but as she was flipping through pages, she would draw out the symbols that she saw.